Data School FOCUS

Andreas Duenser

Comparison of Adzuna and IVI Job Ads Data


Andreas - Psychology inspired Human-Factors researcher.

Chloe Plet

NSW Groundwater hydrogeochemistry


With a background on biominerals, palaeoenvironemental reconstruction and organic geochemistry, I am now a postdoctoral researcher at CSIRO. Although I learned some matlab during my undergrad, I had never really understood it or used it. I was mostly using excel, which often made me very frustrated. I really enjoyed the data school FOCUS particularly learning to “speak to computers” and basic coding skills. Learning R basics has definitely changed my perspective on how to record data and given me a new view on time management when receiving large and complex excel datasheets.

Douglas Bearham, Daniel Gorman and Mat Vanderklift

Gamma irradiation does not affect the stable isotope signals of fish, crustaceans, submerged vegetation or soils.


I work for CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric research in the benthic ecology team. I’m a former pearl diver and researcher with Paspaley Pearls in Broome WA. My main research interests to use stable isotopes in food web analysis. I’ve never needed much coding before Data School other than loading other peoples scripts and running them to generate figures. I have been off work for the last two years recovering from a heart attack. I’m glad to be alive and back at work!

Felix Weihs

Development and application of Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer-based sensors


In my postdoctoral fellowship, I am constructing sensors made of proteins that are based on a biophysical phenomenon called Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (BRET). A light-generating luciferase coupled to an energy acceptor such as a fluorescent protein emit light with different wavelength maxima. The available options are endless, but based on certain properties, I am designing and constructing new and superior BRET system which in turn are applied as biosensors in human blood.

Gilbert Permalloo

Investigating the use of portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy for rapid quantification of Phosphorus in wheat straw and grains


My name is Gilbert Permalloo. I am a Research Project Officer and I am presently working on roots architecture and rhizosphere of wheat. I worked in sugarcane agronomy for about 24 years and I was doing a little bit of basic programming in Fortran 77 and GWBasic about 30 years ago. Most of my data manipulation and visualisation are done in Excel. I could not write any code in R before I joined Data School and I was spending lots of time working with data in spreadsheets. On the otherhand, I am amazed to witness every day the marvel that R can do with data manipulation and visualisation.

Mandy Yialeloglou

Benefits to hazard reporting


Introduce yourself. I joined CSIRO in 1989 as a laboartory technician. I have been fortunate to have had many oportunities in both technical and support roles in my 30 years. I moved into the HSE team in 2005 and in my current role as “HSE Specialist - Systems and Analytics” in 2018. I manage our HSE reporting systems and forms, I have a really great working relationship with my IM&T colleagues. I am perfecty happy in the system administration space but I had very few current anaytical skills. I rely heavily on IM&T support for my ‘data wrangling’ and wanted to upskill With the incresing demand from the Board, ET and Busines Units for both regular and ad hoc HSE data anaylsis I am workig to create a process to accommodate these and be able to answer the ‘what if’, ‘why’? questions.

Marina Alexander

Mining the transcriptome for biomarkers of infection


Hi my name is Marina. I work on viruses. Before data school I would typically enter my data into Excel or Prism to make bar graphs with errors bars, then communicate these in publications and powerpoint slides. Using R, I can now reproducibly wrangle data imported from Excel, plot with ggplot2 to make really flexible and informative visualisations of the raw data. This has helped me to understand the sources of variation in my data, apply appropriate statistics and make novel visualisations.

Nathalie Colgrave

Analytics & Decision Sciences Program


My name is Nathalie Colgrave. I work in Finance supporting CSIRO Data61. Data School was my introduction to coding. Prior to Data School, monthly reports were compiled via manipulation in excel through cell referencing as well as usuage of functions such as vlookup.